If I had the money, I get a local, custom made desk-top with a simple RAID 1 set-up. This way you only get/pay for what you need and if anything happens, then you got someone local to fix/replace your computer.

verily, that doth suck mightily, yea its’ suckage compareth to that of a .. eh, screw it, wordsmithery is your demesne anyway.
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It sucks. I’m sorry to hear you’re in this jam. Have you considered one of those online backup deals?
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Mew

“PPS: Damned if I know when regular posting will resume.”
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And just what the bloody Hades am I supposed to do for worthwhile content in the meantime? :/
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Seriously, I ‘ll see what I can kick in to get things up and going, and I’m sorry you have to deal with this.

Well, *hopefully* the technician that I’m going to bring the computer to tomorrow will be able to repair the problem, or at least pull the data off of the hard drive (all the signs point to either a bad power unit, or a bad motherboard, not a drive failure). And I’m going to be able to afford replacing the desktop. It’s just that I did that last year, and I should have spent my money on better quality then, and so I can’t really justify replacing AND getting the Kindle HDX. Repairing, sure: most of the Kindle funds were Amazon-specific anyway. Replacing, no.

My official position on the OS religious wars is 8 bit MS-DOS.
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Yes, I adopted it when 16 bit Dos was old, purely because I am a jerk. (I’m too much of a wet behind the ears snot nosed brat to be able to say much about earlier generations of OS.)
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As a practical matter, I use windows/linux/apple.
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Linux live CDs are useful for certain types of IT task that are probably outside of Moe’s interests.

IF your old system is dead AND IF you end up buying a new machine, AND IF you stick with Windows, then you might consider having the new PC’s vendor persuade Microsoft to transfer your old Windows license to the new machine rather than buying a system with a new copy of Windows on it. If they’ll do it, that should save you some money.

(N.B.: I avoid using Windows whenever possible, so I don’t know whether this is an easy or difficult thing to do. Can anyone confirm or refute? … Anyone? … Bueller?)

I categorically unrecommend HP. They’re not the same company they used to be. I bought a laptop in 2010, and it lasted 8 months before it started intermittenly refusing to boot. I sent it back and it took them a month to turn it around, and within a couple days it was acting up again. Long story short, they “repaired” it three times, running the clock out on the warranty, and it died for good after 17 months of life, after supposedly having the CPU replaced twice and the motherboard replaced twice.

Alas, it happens to all manufacturers’ products. I’m an Apple fan, but some years ago I had a white iBook that was a real lemon — I had to have the mainboard replaced three times before I stripped it for parts and took the remnants to the recycler. (The problem turned out to be due to a widespread manufacturing defect; sometimes Apple replaced defective boards, and sometimes Apple denied the existence of any problems.)

Dells from 2003 through 2007 or so were notorious for using shoddy capacitors that would smoke or explode and take out the motherboard. And yes, HP ain’t what it used to be, either.

In my own experience, the best-made computers (well, the laptops, at least) have been IBM/Lenovo ThinkPads.

You could do what I do. Keep a lot of unsaved notepad files up, and spice things up by buying an external USB HDD and not being diligent about back ups. Then there is the really embarrassing thing.
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If it is anything other than a physical failure of the HDD, stuff can probably be recovered.

It lets you take the SATA hard drive out of your old system and access it with another computer — such as a laptop — via USB cable. It works with both 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch drives. You just plop the bare drive into the slot on top of the box, and magic happens. It’s also useful for backups, since you can buy several bare SATA hard drives and use them (sequentially) as archival storage units.